The school system repeatedly certified that inequality is dependent on the socio-economic characteristics of the family background and that early selection reduces equity in education. Especially school transitions have been and still are part of these political discussions on educational inequality. In comparison with other countries, parents in Austria must choose very early, after four years of comprehensive Primary School, between two school types. They must decide whether their child is to attend the Academic Secondary school (AHS), which is directly connected to a certification for university attendance, or the Lower Secondary School, leading students mostly to vocational or higher vocational education. Finally, the comparative results of the PISA study in 2003 and 2006 ignited a debate on improving studying and learning in schools, which was followed by the implementation of the New Middle School (NMS) as a new school type in Austria and replaced the former Lower Secondary School (see also Pultar, 2021). The aims of the implementation of the NMS were to be accomplished in the local schools through new pedagogical innovations like the introduction of team-teaching, flexible and individualized learning environments, and modern instruction settings. Furthermore, the reform intended to give secondary schools more opportunities for locally based school improvement so as to reduce marginalization processes and intermix social composition by fostering the reputation of the local secondary schools, and to limit the ongoing trend towards attendance at the Academic Secondary School (Hopmann et al. 2012). The NMS were to improve and maintain the high educational aspirations of students, and expand support systems for low achievers. 

Since the school reform tends to reduce regional disparities, the status-quo of regional differences in school attendance seems to be of great interest. Regional disparities in educational behaviour for Austria were discussed and demonstrated even before the implementation of the NMS (Schwabe & Gumpoldsberger, 2006; Fassmann, 2002; Zehetner, Janschitz & Fernandez, 2021). Especially for the transition from Primary to Secondary school there is much empirical evidence indicating that school choices and behaviour differ depending on the residential- and school area and relates to the contextual factors thereof (e.g. Ditton, 2014; Sixt, 2013; Kučerová, Holloway & Jahnke, 2020). In the context of the implementation of the NMS as a school type, which intended to break up existing disparities, the question now arises as to what extent this goal could be achieved by the reform. In the context of the school reform, the paper wants to answer the question if and how the spatial context explains educational decision-making and behaviour at the transitions from Primary School to Secondary I and from Secondary I to Secondary II.

The relationship between regional contexts and school choice is a long-standing interest in the area of the geography of education. As it explicitly mentions regional contextual determinants (e.g., school and job offer, as well as the economic structure of the region and the commuting time to school) to relate towards educational behaviour and offers specific indications for empirical analysis, we draw on Meusburger's (1998 & 2015) educational geographic model of school choice as a theoretical base to identify possible regional context factors. In relation to the research question and the theoretical background, two hypotheses are built: 

• Hypothesis 1: The characteristics of the school-area are linked with the school choice at the transition from elementary to Secondary I and at the transitions from Secondary I to the Secondary II. It is assumed that school choice differs according to the regional characteristics and have a significant impact on school attendance behaviour.
• Hypothesis 2: The effect of the regional characteristics on parent’s school choices differs depending on their educational background.

The study is part of a national evaluation project (NOESIS) launched in 2009 to document and evaluate the stepwise implementation of the NMS in the State of Lower Austria. It included a longitudinal and multi-cohort study to determine which conditions are important for students’ successful educational pathways. To test the assumptions, the school-choice and parent educational-background data from the panel study of three cohorts were used for analysis (cohort 1: N = 526 | cohort 2: N = 634 | cohort 3: N = 670). The whole sampling procedure for the three cohorts of the study began with sixteen NMS in various villages and towns and their neighbouring Primary Schools, Academic secondary Schools and old forms of Lower Secondary Schools were included in the sample to observe changes in school choice and school attendance behaviour over time. Furthermore, geocoded administrative data of 59 communities in Lower Austria (e.g., mostly from the 2001 and 2010 census survey) in which the participants attended elementary school or Lower Secondary School were collected and linked with the panel data from the NOESIS evaluation. The selection of community characteristics was based on Meusburger’s (1998 & 2015) geographical model of school choice and included the elevation above sealevel, the share of academics and the share of the population in the service sector. Furthermore, as the conditions for getting to school and commuting time seem to play an important role for school decisions, travel time from one school location to another was also determined by using local from buses and trains schedules. Using descriptive and hierarchical logistic multi-level analyses we examined whether school choice and school attendance behaviour changed during the implementation of the NMS Policy and what significance regional conditions still have for both. The application of a multi-level analysis allows dealing with that kind of nested data to include context factors of a higher hierarchical level in regression equation models and link aggregated with individual data (Rabe-Hesketh & Skorndal, 2012, Mainhard et al., 2019). The method of multi-level analysis is suitable for avoiding an ecological fallacy, which can be understood as an overestimation of the connection between the individual and the regional level through the aggregation or disaggregation of data.

For the transition from Primary School to Secondary I the hierarchical logistic multi-level analysis conclude that besides the educational background of the family, the reachability of the next AHS plays a significant role in the choice parents make when choosing the school their child will attend beyond fourth grade, and has a small but negative impact. Finally, the study found no evidence of a cross-level effect between the family educational background and the regional context of the Primary School. For the transition from Secondary I to Secondary II the variance of the superordinate level and thus of the regional influences, turns out to be extremely small (one to two percent). This is different with the availability of the closest school conferring a high-school diploma. In cohort 3 a commuting time of over 40 minutes has a negative effect on the probability of attending a higher secondary school. The likelihood for attending a higher secondary school after the NMS decreases about 4.4 times if the next school is more than 40 minutes away. In summary, the results of the study indicate an ongoing trend towards the Academic Secondary School. It seems that middle-class families and more highly educated parents exhibit greater educational mobility towards the academic track in each cohort. Further it seems that changes during the NMS reform (e.g. by introducing a new grading system) made parents uncertain about the feasibility of students’ qualifications for the transition to Secondary II and encouraged this trend. Nevertheless, at the transition to Secondary II (9th grade), regional disparities seem to diminish and more students from the NMS attend higher vocational schools, leading to a general qualification for university entrance. The results emphasize the importance of social geography in school reform processes and will be discussed in relation with current international research findings.

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